Tech

Typhoon Phanfone, known locally in the Philippines as Ursula, was making landfall in the central part of the country when NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite passed overhead on Dec. 24.

Suomi NPP's VIIRS instrument provided a visible image of Phanfone that showed its center had made landfall in the eastern Visayas region of the Philippines. The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) is one of 5 instruments aboard Suomi NPP. VIIRS and other satellite imagery has shown an intermittent eye feature peeking out within a compact area of sustained deep central convection.

At 4 a.m. EST (0900 UTC) on Dec. 24, there were many warning signals in effect for the country. Philippines tropical cyclone Signal #3 was in effect for Luzon (northern Philippines) that included Masbate including Ticao Island. In Visayas (central Philippines), the warning covered Northern Samar, eastern Samar, Samar, Biliran, Leyte and extreme northern Cebu.

Signal #2 was in effect in Luzon for the southern part of Cebu, Oriental and Occidental Mindoro, Romblon, Albay, Sorsogon, Burias Island and Calamian and Cuyo Islands.

Also in the Visayas region, Signal #2 included the central part of northern Cebu, northern Antique, Capiz, Aklan, southern Leyte and northern Negros Occidental Mindanao and the Dinagat islands.

Signal #1 was also posted for parts of Luzon that included Bulacan, Bataan, Metro Manila, Rizal, Cavite, rest of Quezon, Laguna, Batangas, Camarines Norte & Sur, Catanduanes, and northern Palawan. In Visayas the signal covered the rest of Cebu, Bohol, Aklan, rest of Antique, rest of Iloilo, Guimaras, rest of Negros Occidental and Negros Oriental. Signal #1 was also posted for Mindanao's Surigao del Northe including Siargao and Bucas Grande Islands.

At 4 a.m. EST (0900 UTC) Phanfone (Philippines designation Ursula) was located near latitude 11.1 degrees north and longitude 126.5 degrees east, about 384 nautical miles east-southeast of Manila, Philippines. Phanfone was moving to the west-northwest with maximum sustained winds 65 knots (75 mph/120 kph).

Phanfone is forecast to strengthen to 80 knots as it moves over the Sulu Sea, and strengthen further once it moves into the South China Sea.

International Journal of Modern Physics has published an article by the IKBFU Physics and Mathematics Institute Artyom Astashenok and the Institute's MA student Alexander Teplyakov. The article refers to the issue of the "Dark Enegry" and an assumption is made that the Universe has borders.

Artyom Astashenok told:

"The fact that our Universe is expanding was discovered almost a hundred years ago, but how exactly this happens, scientists realized only in the 90s of the last century, when powerful telescopes (including orbital ones) appeared and the era of exact cosmology began. In the course of observations and analysis of the data obtained, it turned out that the Universe is not just expanding, but expanding with acceleration, which began three to four billion years after the birth of the Universe".

For a long time it was believed that space is filled with ordinary matter - stars, planets, asteroids, comets and highly rarefied intergalactic gas. But, if this is so, then accelerated expansion is contrary to the law of gravity, which says that bodies are attracted to each other. Gravitational forces tend to slow down the expansion of the universe, but cannot accelerate it.

Artyom Astashenok says:

"And then the idea was born that the Universe is filled for the most part not with ordinary matter, but with some "dark energy", which has special properties. No one knows what is it and how it works, so it named "Dark Energy" as something unknown. And 70% of the Universe consists of this Energy".

There are many theories of what the "Dark Energy" is, and the IKBFU scientists presented their own theory.

"The so-called Casimir effect (named after the Dutch physicist Hendrik Casimir), which consists in the fact that two metal plates placed in a vacuum are attracted to each other, has long been known. It would seem that this cannot be, because there is nothing in the vacuum. But in fact, according to quantum theory, particles constantly appear and disappear there, and as a result of their interaction with plates, which indicate certain boundaries of space (which is extremely important), a very small attraction occurs. And there is an idea according to this, approximately the same thing happens in space. Only this leads, on the contrary, to additional repulsion, which accelerates the expansion of the Universe. That is, there is essentially no "Dark Energy", but there is a manifestation of the boundaries of the Universe. This of course does not mean that it ends somewhere, but some kind of complex topology can take place. You can draw an analogy with the Earth. After all, it also has no boundaries, but it is finite. The difference between the Earth and the Universe is that in the first case we are dealing with two-dimensional space, and in the second - with three-dimensional"

The published article, which, as explained by Artem Astashenok, develops the ideas presented in the thesis of Alexander Teplyakov, presents a mathematically sound model of the universe in which additional repulsion occurs, and where there is no contradiction between the fact that the expansion of the Universe accelerates and the law of universal gravitation.

Researchers in the Cellular and Molecular Synaptic Function Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) have elucidated the roles of cytoskeletal proteins at the giant presynaptic terminal, called the calyx of Held, visualized in rat brainstem slices. Initial findings were made by a graduate school student Lashmi Pyriya for her PhD thesis work under technical instructions by Dr Kohgaku Eguchi (now in IST Austria) and Dr Laurent Guillaud. This work was then substantiated by Dr Han-Ying Wang (Fig 3) and finally accepted for publication in the Journal of Neuroscience.

The scientists' findings provide crucial insight into the function and location of microtubules in neurotransmission. Their research may also shed light on mechanisms of synaptic dysfunctions occurring in neuronal diseases like Alzheimer's Disease and Parkinson's Disease.

The main findings are 3-fold.

(1) Co-existence of MTs with SVs in presynaptic terminals.

It has been controversial whether MTs exist in presynaptic terminals, and none of past reports support co-existence of MTs with SVs. Using a high-resolution STED microscope, at the calyx of Held, OIST researchers successfully demonstrated that ~50% of SVs co-exist with MTs with an average distance of 44 nm

(2) F-actin and MTs support fast and slow SV replenishments, respectively

Soon after SVs are docked, they release transmitter at release sites, which is then immediately (tf 0.1s) replenished by docked SVs and docking site is then replenished more slowly (ts 2s) by reserve SVs. When MTs were depolymerized, the slow component of SV replenishment prolonged. The magnitude of prolongation was proportional to that of MT depolymerization assayed by live imaging. In contrast, F-actin depolymerization specifically prolonged the fast replenishing rate tf

(3) F-actin and MT support sustained high-frequency neurotransmission?

Delay of SV replenishment will impair maintenance of neurotransmission, particularly at high frequency. At the calyx of Held synapse, presynaptic stimulations at 100 Hz unfailingly generate APs in postsynaptic neurons for at least 50 s. When MTs are depolymerized, postsynaptic APs start to fail at around 20s and AP failures reach 40% after 50s stimulation. The effect of F-actin depolymerization is relatively weak, with 20% failures after 50s stimulation (Fig 4). These results indicate that cytoskeletal proteins in presynaptic terminals are essential for the maintenance of high-frequency neurotransmission.

These findings provide a new insight into the mechanisms of synaptic dysfunctions occurring in neuronal diseases. Since both ?-synuclein in Parkinson's disease and tau protein in Alzheimer disease exert toxic functions in presynaptic terminals, it is of crucial importance to elucidate presynaptic molecular mechanisms involved in the etiology of neuronal diseases.

Silicene consists of a single layer of silicon atoms. In contrast to the ultra-flat material graphene, which is made of carbon, silicene shows surface irregularities that influence its electronic properties. Now, physicists from the University of Basel have been able to precisely determine this corrugated structure. As they report in the journal PNAS, their method is also suitable for analyzing other two-dimensional materials.

Since the experimental production of graphene, two-dimensional materials have been at the heart of materials research. Similar to carbon, a single layer of honeycombed atoms can be made from silicon. This material, known as silicene, has an atomic roughness, in contrast to graphene, since some atoms are at a higher level than others.

Silicene not completely flat

Now, the research team, led by Professor Ernst Meyer of the Department of Physics and the Swiss Nanoscience Institute of the University of Basel, has succeeded in quantitatively representing these tiny height differences and detecting the different arrangement of atoms moving in a range of less than one angstrom - that is, less than a 10-millionth of a millimeter.

"We use low-temperature atomic force microscopy with a carbon monoxide tip," explains Dr. Rémy Pawlak, who played a leading role in the experiments. Force spectroscopy allows the quantitative determination of forces between the sample and the tip. Thus, the height in relation to the surface can be detected and individual atoms can be chemically identified. The measurements show excellent agreement with simulations carried out by partners at the Instituto de Ciencia de Materiales de Madrid (ICMM).

Different electronic properties

This unevenness, known as buckling, influences the electronic properties of the material. Unlike graphene, which is known to be an excellent conductor, on a silver surface silicene behaves more like a semiconductor. "In silicene, the perfect honeycomb structure is disrupted. This is not necessarily a disadvantage, as it could lead to the emergence of interesting quantum phenomena, such as the quantum spin hall effect," says Meyer.

The method developed by the researchers in Basel offers new insights into the world of two-dimensional materials and the relationship between structure and electronic properties.

A major issue with operating ring-shaped fusion facilities known as tokamaks is keeping the plasma that fuels fusion reactions free of impurities that could reduce the efficiency of the reactions. Now, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have found that sprinkling a type of powder into the plasma could aid in harnessing the ultra-hot gas within a tokamak facility to produce heat to create electricity without producing greenhouse gases or long-term radioactive waste.

Fusion, the power that drives the sun and stars, combines light elements in the form of plasma -- the hot, charged state of matter composed of free electrons and atomic nuclei -- that generates massive amounts of energy. Scientists are seeking to replicate fusion on Earth for a virtually inexhaustible supply of power to generate electricity.

"The main goal of the experiment was to see if we could lay down a layer of boron using a powder injector," said PPPL physicist Robert Lunsford, lead author of the paper reporting the results in Nuclear Fusion. "So far, the experiment appears to have been successful."

¬The boron prevents an element known as tungsten from leaching out of the tokamak walls into the plasma, where it can cool the plasma particles and make fusion reactions less efficient. A layer of boron is applied to plasma-facing surfaces in a process known as "boronization." Scientists want to keep the plasma as hot as possible -- at least ten times hotter than the surface of the sun -- to maximize the fusion reactions and therefore the heat to create electricity.

Using powder to provide boronization is also far safer than using a boron gas called diborane, the method used today. "Diborane gas is explosive, so everybody has to leave the building housing the tokamak during the process," Lunsford said. "On the other hand, if you could just drop some boron powder into the plasma, that would be a lot easier to manage. While diborane gas is explosive and toxic, boron powder is inert," he added. "This new technique would be less intrusive and definitely less dangerous."

Another advantage is that while physicists must halt tokamak operations during the boron gas process, boron powder can be added to the plasma while the machine is running. This feature is important because to provide a constant source of electricity, future fusion facilities will have to run for long, uninterrupted periods of time. "This is one way to get to a steady-state fusion machine," Lunsford said. "You can add more boron without having to completely shut down the machine."

There are other reasons to use a powder dropper to coat the inner surfaces of a tokamak. For example, the researchers discovered that injecting boron powder has the same benefit as puffing nitrogen gas into the plasma -- both techniques increase the heat at the plasma edge, which increases how well the plasma stays confined within the magnetic fields.

The powder dropper technique also gives scientists an easy way to create low-density fusion plasmas, important because low density allows plasma instabilities to be suppressed by magnetic pulses, a relatively simple way to improve fusion reactions. Scientists could use powder to create low-density plasmas at any time, rather than waiting for a gaseous boronization. Being able to create a wide range of plasma conditions easily in this way would enable physicists to explore the behavior of plasma more thoroughly.

In the future, Lunsford and the other scientists in the group hope to conduct experiments to determine where, exactly, the material goes after it has been injected into the plasma. Physicists currently hypothesize that the powder flows to the top and bottom of the tokamak chamber, the same way the plasma flows, "but it would be useful to have that hypothesis backed up by modeling so we know the exact locations within the tokamak that are getting the boron layers," Lunsford said.

Dust plays a crucial role in the life and health of our planet. In our modern world, dust-borne nutrients traveling in great dust storms from the Saharan Desert fertilize the soil in the Amazon Rainforest and feed photosynthetic organisms like algae in the Atlantic Ocean. In turn, it is those organisms that breathe in carbon dioxide and expel oxygen.

Mehrdad Sardar Abadi, a researcher in the Mewbourne College of Earth and Energy School of Geosciences and School director Lynn Soreghan, led a study with researchers from Florida State University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Hampton University and the College of Charleston, to understand the role of dust on the Earth's atmosphere in deep time - 300 million years ago.

To do this research, the team needed to find ancient atmospheric dust, which led them to the remnants of a shallow marine ecosystem in modern-day Iran.

Similar to areas of our modern world like the Bahamas, these shallow marine ecosystems cannot survive unless they are in pristine water away from river runoff, Sardar Abadi explained. By targeting the systems, Sardar Abadi and Soreghan knew that silicate particles they found would have been deposited through the air and not from a river.

Sardar Abadi and Soreghan identified and sampled dust trapped in carbonate rocks from two intervals of limestone now preserved in outcroppings in the mountains of northern and central Iran.

Rocks were then subjected to a series of chemical treatments to extract the ancient dust. What was left were silicate minerals like clay and quartz that entered the environment as air-borne particles - 300-million-year-old dust.

Ancient dust in hand, Sardar Abadi could determine how much dust was in the Late Paleozoic atmosphere. Their results suggested that Earth's atmosphere was much dustier during this ancient time. Working with collaborators at Florida State University, he performed geochemical tests to analyze the iron in the samples. Those tests revealed that the ancient dust also contained remarkable proportions of highly reactive iron -- a particularly rich source of this key micronutrient.

While iron is not the only micronutrient potentially carried in dust, it is estimated that this ancient dust contained twice the bioavailable iron as the modern dust that fertilizes the Amazon Rainforest.

This potent dust fertilization led to a massive surge in marine photosynthesizers. Fueled by iron-rich dust, algae and cyanobacteria took in carbon dioxide and expelled oxygen. Researchers speculate that this action, operating over millions of years, changed the planet's atmosphere.

"Higher abundances in primary producers like plants and algae could lead to higher carbon capture, helping to explain declines in atmospheric carbon dioxide around 300 million years ago," said Sardar Abadi.

"If what we are seeing from our samples was happening on a global scale, it means that the dust fertilization effect brought down atmospheric carbon dioxide and was a fairly significant part of the carbon cycle during this time in the Earth's history," said Soreghan.

One carbon sequestration method scientists have proposed is adding bioavailable iron to isolated parts of the ocean that are so remote and far from dust-containing continents, they are essentially deserts. Scientists who have attempted this on a small scale have documented resultant phytoplankton blooms.

But, Soreghan warned, no one knows the unintended consequences of doing this on a large scale. This is why Sardar Abadi and the team of researchers delved into deep time for answers.

"The Earth's geologic record is like a laboratory book. It has run an infinite number of experiments. We can open Earth's lab book, reconstruct what happened in the past and see how the Earth responded to these sometimes very extreme states," said Soreghan.

The data and syntheses help constrain and refine computer climate models. The further back into deep time a modeler goes, the more unconstrained variables there are. By providing data, models can be more accurate.

"By delving back in time, we can uncover the most extreme states the Earth and atmosphere have experienced," said Soreghan. "That information can potentially help us solve problems today."

Scientists at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital have discovered a new way that the molecule RIPK1 leads to cell death in infected, damaged or unwanted cells showing that more than one mechanism can trigger the process. The findings appeared online today in the Journal of Experimental Medicine.

"Our findings break the existing dogma that RIPK1 kinase activity is required for cell death," said Thirumala-Devi Kanneganti, Ph.D., a member in the St. Jude Department of Immunology.

The discovery of the alternate RIPK1 mechanism offers the promise of drug treatments to protect patients from the inflammatory, cell-killing response of septic shock and other inflammatory diseases as well as cancer.

'Cleaning house' by triggering cell death

The immune system protects the body and rids itself of unwanted cells in health and disease through three major programmed cell-death mechanisms, called pyroptosis, apoptosis and necroptosis. Kanneganti's lab has dubbed the processes collectively PANoptosis.

Kanneganti and her colleagues had shown that RIPK1 kinase activity functions as a cell switch to activate PANoptosis. RIPK1 triggers this form of cell death when cell survival molecules such as TAK1 are inhibited. TAK1's function is central to the body's protection against a broad range of bacteria, viruses and other agents. Pathogens have evolved to inhibit TAK1 in order to evade the immune response.

Researchers developed a model system to study the phenomenon. The investigators selectively blocked TAK1 and the RIPK1 kinase function in white blood cells called macrophages that were exposed to microbial molecules.

Despite the loss of RIPK1 kinase function, the cells reacted as if the immune system had been activated. TAK1 deletion or inhibition triggered cell death. "The results showed the immune system recognizes loss of TAK1 function as a danger signal," Kanneganti said. "That drives the robust inflammation and cell death of PANoptosis with the goal of fighting infection."

But the enhanced inflammation and sensitivity to cell death left mice with altered macrophages at greater susceptibility to septic shock.

Dual mechanisms of action

To the researchers' surprise, their experiments identified a separate route to RIPK1 activation--in which the molecule acts as a "scaffold" to support a separate molecular mechanism that triggers PANoptosis. Their work demonstrated how PANoptosis can be triggered even when RIPK1's kinase activity is inactivated.

"We highlight for the first time a kinase-independent role for RIPK1 in promoting a novel and versatile cell death complex which drives PANoptosis, the cell death pathways involved in several inflammatory disorders," Kanneganti said. "Dysregulation of this complex can lead to severe diseases, including septic shock. Our work underscores the importance of investigating the homeostatic molecular mechanisms of inflammatory cell death in health and disease."

The findings also offer the potential of drugs that could trigger PANoptotic cell suicide in proliferating cancer cells. Such drug treatments could aid cancer immunotherapy, in which a patient's own immune system is activated to attack tumors.

Farmers could soon be growing tomatoes bunched like grapes in a storage unit, on the roof of a skyscraper, or even in space. That's if a clutch of new gene-edited crops prove as fruitful as the first batch.

The primary goal of this new research is to engineer a wider variety of crops that can be grown in urban environments or other places not suitable for plant growth, said Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Professor and HHMI Investigator Zach Lippman, who leads the lab that designed the 'urban agriculture tomatoes.'

These new gene-edited tomato plants look nothing like the long vines you might find growing in a backyard garden or in agricultural fields. The most notable feature is their bunched, compact fruit. They resemble a bouquet whose roses have been replaced by ripe cherry tomatoes. They also mature quickly, producing ripe fruit that's ready for harvest in under 40 days. And you can eat them.

"They have a great small shape and size, they taste good, but of course that all depends on personal preference," Lippman said.

Most importantly, they're eco-friendly.

"This demonstrates how we can produce crops in new ways, without having to tear up the land as much or add excessive fertilizer that runs off into rivers and streams," Lippman said. "Here's a complementary approach to help feed people, locally and with a reduced carbon footprint."

That's good news for anyone concerned about climate change. Earlier this year, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that more than 500 million people are living on land already degraded by deforestation, changing weather patterns, and overuse of viable cropland. By shifting some of the burden of growing the world's crops to urban and other areas, there's hope that desperate land mismanagement will slow.

Urban agricultural systems often call for compact plants that can be slotted or stacked into tight spaces, such as in tiered farming in warehouses or in converted storage containers. To make up for crop yield constrained by limited space, urban farms can operate year-round in climate-controlled conditions. That's why it's beneficial to use plants that can be grown and harvested quickly. More harvests per year results in more food, even if the space used is very small.

Lippman and his colleagues created the new tomatoes by fine-tuning two genes that control the switch to reproductive growth and plant size, the SELF PRUNING (SP) and SP5G genes, which caused the plant to stop growing sooner and flower and fruit earlier. But Lippman's lab knew it could only modify the SP sister genes only so much before trading flavor or yield for even smaller plants.

"When you're playing with plant maturation, you're playing with the whole system, and that system includes the sugars, where they're made, which is the leaves, and how they're distributed, which is to the fruits," Lippman said.

Searching for a third player, Lippman's team recently discovered the gene SIER, which controls the lengths of stems. Mutating SIER with the CRISPR gene-editing tool and combining it with the mutations in the other two flowering genes created shorter stems and extremely compact plants.

Lippman is refining this technique, published in the latest issues of Nature Biotechnology, and hopes others will be inspired to try it on other fruit crops like kiwi. By making crops and harvests shorter, Lippman believes that agriculture can reach new heights.

"I can tell you that NASA scientists have expressed some interest in our new tomatoes," he said.

While the first ship to Mars probably won't have its own farm, astronauts may still get to test their green thumbs with urbanized, space-faring tomatoes.

Holidays are a time for family. Festive gatherings with parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles create memories that last a lifetime. But when a loved one has Alzheimer's disease (AD), holidays often become painful reminders of loss and deterioration. Currently, Alzheimer's affects one-in-ten adults over the age of 65--a number that is expected to triple by 2030. The need to find a cure is great.

Now there may be a glimmer of hope. A research team headed by Hervé Bercovier, Charles Greenblatt and Benjamin Klein at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HU)'s Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics has discovered that the Bacillus Calmette-Gue?rin (BCG) vaccine, originally developed for tuberculosis and commonly used to treat bladder cancer, may also be an effective treatment to prevent Alzheimer's. They published their findings in PLOS ONE.

"There's data reaching back to the 1960's that shows that countries treating bladder cancer patients with the BCG vaccine had a lower prevalence of Alzheimer's disease but it hadn't been properly analyzed," shared lead author Bercovier.

Until now. Bercovier and his team followed 1,371 bladder cancer patients receiving treatment at HU's Hadassah Medical Center. The average patient age was 68. During follow-up visits, 65 cancer patients had developed Alzheimer's. Those who had not received BCG as part of their treatment had a significantly higher risk of developing Alzheimer's than did BCG-treated patients: 8.9% (44 patients) as opposed to 2.4% (21). Further, when compared with the general (healthy) population, people who had never been treated with BCG had a 4-fold higher risk for developing Alzheimer's than did those who were treated with BCG.

It's important to note that the researchers have not developed a vaccine that prevents Alzheimer's. However, shared Bercovier "our study is an important step towards understanding the ways in which our immune system is a major player in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's and how the BCG vaccine, which modulates the immune system, may serve as an effective preventative treatment to this crippling condition."

And that would be the best holiday gift of all.

When electrons collide with positrons, their antimatter counterparts, unstable pairs can form in which both types of particle orbit around each other. Named 'positronium', physicists have now produced this intriguing structure using a diverse range of positron targets - from atomic gases to metal films. However, they have yet to achieve the same result from vapours of nanoparticles, whose unique properties are influenced by the 'gases' of free electrons they contain in well-defined, nanoscopic regions. In new research published in EPJ D, Paul-Antoine Hervieux at the University of Strasbourg, France and Himadri Chakraborty at Northwest Missouri State University, USA, reveal the characteristics of positronium formation within football-shaped nanoparticles, C60, for the first time. At specific positron impact energies, they show that positronium emission dominates in the same direction as the incoming antiparticles.

Commonly known as buckminsterfullerene, or 'buckyballs', C60 is stable, easily synthesised and sustainable at room temperatures. Thanks to these useful properties, Hervieux and Chakraborty's findings could have important implications for fields including astrophysics, materials physics, and pharmaceutical research. In particular, they could offer improvements in tests of how antimatter responds to gravity, which can involve structures including dipositronium and antihydrogen atoms; each of which feature positronium in the first steps of their fabrication processes.

When positrons of certain energies approach buckyballs at angles of up to 10 degrees, the physicists showed that a series of narrow, forward-facing positronium signals resulted from the 'diffraction resonance' of the particles. The effect is comparable to how light is diffracted by microscopic spherical obstructions; showing variation with larger fullerene molecules like C240, and when particles are excited to higher energy levels. Hervieux and Chakraborty modelled these properties through theoretical calculations of how diffraction resonance affected the angles over which positronium is emitted, as a function of positron impact energy. Their results offer important insights for the wide variety of researchers who use these short-lived structures. In future studies, the duo now hopes to further explore their potential for use in real experiments.

In Europe, transport is responsible for nearly 30% of the total CO2 emissions, of which 72% comes from road transportation*. While the use of electric vehicles for personal transportation could help lower that number, reducing emissions from commercial transport - such as trucks or buses - is a much greater challenge.

Researchers at EPFL have now come up with a novel solution: capturing CO2 directly in the trucks' exhaust system and liquefying it in a box on the vehicle's roof. The liquid CO2 is then delivered to a service station, where it is turned into conventional fuel using renewable energy. The project is being coordinated by the Industrial Process and Energy Systems Engineering group, led by François Maréchal, at EPFL's School of Engineering. The patented concept is the subject of a paper published in Frontiers in Energy Research.

A complex process onboard the vehicle

Scientists propose to combine several technologies developed at EPFL to capture CO2 and convert it from a gas to a liquid in a process that recovers most of energy available onboard, such as heat from the engine. In their study, the scientists used the example of a delivery truck.

First, the vehicle's flue gases in the exhaust pipe are cooled down and the water is separated from the gases. CO2 is isolated from the other gases (nitrogen and oxygen) with a temperature swing adsorption system, using metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) adsorbent, which are specially designed to absorb CO2. Those materials are being developed by the Energypolis team at EPFL Valais Wallis, led by Wendy Queen. Once the material is saturated with CO2, it is heated so that pure CO2 can be extracted from it. High speed turbocompressors developed by Jürg Schiffmann's laboratory at EPFL's Neuchâtel campus use heat from the vehicle's engine to compress the extracted CO2 and turn it into a liquid. That liquid is stored in a tank and can then be converted back into conventional fuel at the service stations using renewable electricity. "The truck simply deposits the liquid when filling up with fuel," says Maréchal.

The whole process takes place within a capsule measuring 2 m x 0.9 m x 1.2 m, placed above the driver's cabin. "The weight of the capsule and the tank is only 7% of the vehicle's payload," adds Maréchal. "The process itself uses little energy, because all of its stages have been optimized."

The researchers' calculations show that a truck using 1 kg of conventional fuel could produce 3kg of liquid CO2, and that the conversion does not involve any energy penalty.

Only 10% of the CO2 emissions cannot be recycled, and the researchers propose to offset that using biomass.

The system could theoretically work with all trucks, buses and even boats, and with any type of fuel. The advantage of this system is that, unlike electric or hydrogen-based ones, it can be retrofitted to existing trucks in order to neutralize their impact in terms of carbon emissions.

A collaboration led by scientists at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology (TUAT), Japan, has discovered that daily energy balance of Asian black bears (Ursus thibetanus) exhibited seasonal change with a twin-peak pattern: up in spring, down to the lowest point in summer, and up again in autumn. From spring to summer, the energy balance is surprisingly negative. Interestingly, bears obtain about 80% of the energy they need in a year by eating acorns in autumn.

Energy balance (i.e., energy intake minus energy usage) is an essential factor when evaluating an animal's nutritional state. "We aimed to identify periods of the year that are most important for Asian black bears in terms of energy balance," said the senior and corresponding author Dr Shinsuke Koike, associate professor at TUAT. "We estimated daily energy balance of 34 bears fitted with GPS collars in the central Japan as follows. Energy intake of bears was estimated using the energy content (kcal/g) of major food items, their average ingestion rate (g/min), and daily feeding time (min). Then, energy usage was calculated by an equation for the costs of resting, traveling, and feeding based on behavioral data monitored by the GPS collars."

Because food habits of bears change seasonally, each month scientists estimated the daily energy balance. Also, because bears change their feeding behavior depending on the availability of hard mast, they made separate estimations for years of good and poor mast conditions during autumn. The scientists then identified major food items from fecal analysis and calculated the gross energy content per unit for each item.

"We have been directly watching bears feeding over 10 years. And we measured ingestion rates of the major food items; acorns on the tree had the highest ingestion rate, while the values of other items did not show notable characteristics," said Koike. "We obsterved that the variability of energy expenditure rose moderately in good mast years, except for males. On the other hand, there was a twin-peak pattern of energy intake and energy balance, declining from May to July, rising again from August to October, and declining in November."

"Interstingly, only for females, the peak of energy intake and energy balance was larger in good mast years than in poor mast years, while the cumulative energy balance in good mast years was larger than in poor mast years for both females and males. After poor mast years, the cumulative energy balance of males become negative in February, during hibernation, and did not exceed zero until August, even if they could start feeding in May," Koike explains. "Thus, further longitudinal studies that examine cumulative energy balance, rather than energy balance alone, are necessary to clarify the seasonal change in the nutritional state of Asian black bears" adds Koike.

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Scientists have created thin films made from barium zirconium sulfide (BaZrS3) and confirmed that the materials have alluring electronic and optical properties predicted by theorists.

The films combine exceptionally strong light absorption with good charge transport -- two qualities that make them ideal for applications such as photovoltaics and light-emitting diodes (LEDs).

In solar panels, for example, experimental results suggest that BaZrS3 films would be much more efficient at converting sunlight into electricity than traditional silicon-based materials with identical thicknesses, says lead researcher Hao Zeng, PhD, professor of physics in the University at Buffalo College of Arts and Sciences. This could lower solar energy costs, especially because the new films performed admirably even when they had imperfections. (Manufacturing nearly flawless materials is typically more expensive, Zeng explains.)

"For many decades, there have been only a handful of semiconductor materials that have been used, with silicon being the dominant material," Zeng says. "Our thin films open the door to a new direction in semiconductor research. There's a chance to explore the potential of a whole new class of materials."

The study was published in November in the journal Nano Energy.

UB physics PhD students Xiucheng Wei and Haolei Hui were the first authors. The project -- funded by a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) SunShot award and National Science Foundation (NSF) Sustainable Chemistry, Engineering and Materials award -- included contributions from researchers at UB; Taiyuan Normal University, Southern University of Science & Technology, Xi'an Jiaotong University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, all in China; Los Alamos National Laboratory; and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Experiments inspired by theoretical predictions

BaZrS3 belongs to a category of materials known as chalcogenide perovskites, which are nontoxic, earth-abundant compounds. In recent years, theorists have calculated that various chalcogenide perovskites should exhibit useful electronic and optical properties, and these predictions have captured the interest and imagination of experimentalists like Zeng.

BaZrS3 is not a totally new material. Zeng looked into the history of the compound, and found information dating back to the 1950s.

"It has existed for more than half a century," he says. "Among earlier research, a company in Niagara Falls produced it in powder form. I think people paid little attention to it."

But thin films -- not powder -- are needed for applications such as photovoltaics and LEDs, so that's what Zeng's team set out to create.

The researchers crafted their BaZrS3 films by using a laser to heat up and vaporize barium zirconium oxide. The vapor was deposited on a sapphire surface, forming a film, and then converted into the final material through a chemical reaction called sulfurization.

"Semiconductor research has traditionally been highly focused on conventional materials," Hui says. "This is an opportunity to explore something new. Chalcogenide perovskites share some similarities to the widely researched halide perovskites, but do not suffer from the toxicity and instability of the latter materials."

"Now that we have a thin film made from BaZrS3, we can study its fundamental properties and how it might be used in solar panels, LEDs, optical sensors and other applications," Wei says.

Princeton researchers have uncovered new rules governing how objects absorb and emit light, fine-tuning scientists' control over light and boosting research into next-generation solar and optical devices.

The discovery solves a longstanding problem of scale, where light's behavior when interacting with tiny objects violates well-established physical constraints observed at larger scales.

"The kinds of effects you get for very small objects are different from the effects you get from very large objects," said Sean Molesky, a postdoctoral researcher in electrical engineering and the study's first author. The difference can be observed in moving from a molecule to a grain of sand. "You can't simultaneously describe both things," he said.

The problem stems from light's famous shapeshifting nature. For ordinary objects, light's movement can be described by straight lines, or rays. But for microscopic objects, light's wave properties take over and the neat rules of ray optics break down. The effects are significant. In important modern materials, observations at the micron scale showed infrared light radiating at millions of times more energy per unit area than ray optics predicts.

The new rules, published in Physical Review Letters on Dec. 20, tell scientists how much infrared light an object of any scale can be expected to absorb or emit, resolving a decades-old discrepancy between big and small. The work extends a 19th-century concept, known as a blackbody, into a useful modern context. Blackbodies are idealized objects that absorb and emit light with maximum efficiency.

"There's been a lot of research done to try to understand in practice, for a given material, how one can approach these blackbody limits," said Alejandro Rodriguez, an associate professor of electrical engineering and the study's principal investigator. "How can we make a perfect absorber? A perfect emitter?"

"It's a very old problem that many physicists -- including Planck, Einstein and Boltzmann -- tackled early on and laid the foundations for the development of quantum mechanics."

A large body of previous work has shown that structuring objects with nanoscale features can enhance absorption and emission, effectively trapping photons in a tiny hall of mirrors. But no one had defined the fundamental limits of the possible, leaving open major questions about how to assess a design.

No longer confined to brute-force trial and error, the new level of control will allow engineers to optimize designs mathematically for a wide range of future applications. The work is especially important in technologies like solar panels, optical circuits and quantum computers.

Currently, the team's findings are specific to thermal sources of light, like the sun or like an incandescent bulb. But the researchers hope to generalize the work further to agree with other light sources, like LEDs, fireflies, or arcing bolts of electricity.

Spintronics or spin electronics in contrast to conventional electronics uses the spin of electrons for sensing, information storage, transport, and processing. Potential advantages are nonvolatility, increased data processing speed, decreased electric power consumption, and higher integration densities compared to conventional semiconductor devices. Molecular spintronics aims for the ultimate step towards miniaturization of spintronics by striving to actively control the spin states of individual molecules. Chemists and physicists at Kiel University joined forces with colleagues from France, and Switzerland to design, deposit and operate single molecular spin switches on surfaces. The newly developed molecules feature stable spin states and do not lose their functionality upon adsorption on surfaces. They present their results in the current issue of the renowned journal Nature Nanotechnology.

The spin states of the new compounds are stable for at least several days. "This is achieved by a design trick that resembles the fundamental electronic circuits in computers, the so-called flip-flops. Bistability or switching between 0 and 1 is realized by looping the output signal back to the input", says experimental physicist Dr. Manuel Gruber from Kiel University. The new molecules have three properties that are coupled with each other in such a feedback loop: their shape (planar or flat), the proximity of two subunits, called coordination (yes or no), and the spin state (high-spin or low-spin). Thus, the molecules are locked either in one or the other state. Upon sublimation and deposition on a silver surface, the switches self-assemble into highly ordered arrays. Each molecule in such an array can be separately addressed with a scanning tunneling microscope and switched between the states by applying a positive or negative voltage.

„Our new spin switch realizes in just one molecule what takes several components like transistors and resistors in conventional electronics. That's a big step towards further miniaturisation", Dr. Manuel Gruber und organic chemist Prof. Dr. Rainer Herges explain. The next step will be to increase the complexity of the compounds to implement more sophisticated operations.

Molecules are the smallest constructions that can be designed and built with atomic precision and predictable properties. Their response to electrical or optical stimuli and their custom-designed chemical and physical functionality make them unique candidates to develop new classes of devices such as controllable surface catalysts or optical devices.